Psychological Bulletin Copyright 2002 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

2002, Vol. 128, No. 6, 978 –996 0033-2909/02/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.128.6.978

Logic and Human Reasoning: An Assessment of the Deduction Paradigm

Jonathan St. B. T. Evans
University of Plymouth

The study of deductive reasoning has been a major paradigm in psychology for approximately the past 40
years. Research has shown that people make many logical errors on such tasks and are strongly
influenced by problem content and context. It is argued that this paradigm was developed in a context
of logicist thinking that is now outmoded. Few reasoning researchers still believe that logic is an
appropriate normative system for most human reasoning, let alone a model for describing the process of
human reasoning, and many use the paradigm principally to study pragmatic and probabilistic processes.
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It is suggested that the methods used for studying reasoning be reviewed, especially the instructional
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context, which necessarily defines pragmatic influences as biases.

The psychology of reasoning has for many years been centered
on the deductive reasoning paradigm in which people are asked to
assess logical arguments or generate valid conclusions from given
premises. Some very early experiments of this kind that can be
found in the psychological literature are the studies of reasoning
with the classical syllogisms reported by Wilkins (1928) and by
Woodworth and Sells (1935). However, the history of the modern
paradigm dates from the early 1960s; since, there has been a
dramatic acceleration in experimental reports in the literature using
this method, turning logic and reasoning into a major field of
cognitive psychology by the end of the 20th century. Three com-
prehensive textbook reviews of the field published at roughly
10-year intervals, Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972; Evans, 1982;
Evans, Newstead, and Byrne, 1993, demonstrate this dramatic
increase in usage of the paradigm (see also Manktelow, 1999, for
a more recent review of the field).
This article has several aims: (a) to provide an outline review of
the empirical findings in this large field of work over the past 40
years or so, (b) to review the development of theoretical ideas
about thinking and reasoning aided by use of the deduction para-
digm over the same period, (c) to show how ideas about logicality
and rationality have radically changed since the paradigm was
devised, and consequentially, (d) to assess the value of the para-
digm in its current form as well as arguments for introducing
significant modifications to it. I demonstrate that the motivations
for creation of the paradigm have changed substantially, as re-
searchers have progressively deemphasized the importance of
logic in human reasoning and in the assessment of human ratio-
This article is an expanded version of a keynote address entitled “Why
Study Deduction? History and Future of the Paradigm,” delivered by
Jonathan St. B. T. Evans to the British Psychological Society Fourth
International Conference on Thinking held at Durham University, Durham,
England, August 2000. I thank David Over, Simon Handley, Aidan Feeney,
Phil Johnson-Laird, and Leda Cosmides for critical comments on an earlier
version of this article and for other discussions that have contributed to the
ideas presented.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jonathan
St. B. T. Evans, Centre for Thinking and Language, Department of Psy-
chology, University of Plymouth, Plymouth PL4 8AA, England. E-mail:
jevans@plym.ac.uk
nality. This is in part due to the findings that the paradigm itself
has yielded, with substantive evidence of pragmatic and other
nonlogical causes of responses to the tasks. Indeed, contemporary
research using the paradigm seems predominantly concerned with
investigating the influence of prior belief and knowledge on hu-
man reasoning and yet ironically persists in using instructions that
define such influences as errors and biases.
The motivation for this article, however, is not simply to rec-
ommend more appropriate methodologies for those who engage in
reasoning research. It is to attempt to remove an unnecessary
barrier between the research on reasoning and the more general
study of thinking, judgment, and decision making. The study of
deductive reasoning, defined narrowly by logic, appears to the
casual observer to stand apart from normal cognitive psychology,
which deals in the nature of mental processes without judging their
correctness relative to a normative standard. I recognized this
problem in an earlier review (Evans, 1982) of the field, in which
I opened with the following paragraph:
In one sense this book is only about deductive reasoning. In another
sense it is about language comprehension, mental imagery, learning
processes, memory organisation and the nature of human thought. The
first sense is defined by the paradigms employed: the second by the
nature of the psychological processes which the paradigms evoke.
(p. 1)
The point that was elaborated throughout that book (Evans,
1982) was that while most reasoning researchers, at least at that
time, thought that they were studying deductive reasoning, what
they were actually studying was behavior on the deduction para-
digm—much of which turns out to have nothing to do with logical
reasoning. Later books have attempted to demonstrate that the
mental processes studied in reasoning research were essentially
similar to those investigated by research on judgment and decision
making (Evans, 1989; Evans & Over, 1996a; Stanovich, 1999). In
spite of the increasing acceptance of these links by many contem-
porary researchers, however, the use of the deduction paradigm
built around standard logic persists. This has led to persistent
examination of questions of a normative nature; in particular, do
people reason logically, and ought people to reason logically? The
major question addressed in this review is whether logic should
have the central importance in the study of reasoning that the

978
 LOGIC AND REASONING
researchers’ favored paradigm presupposes in its instructions. If
not, the separateness of this field from other areas of cognitive
psychology may prove more illusory than real.
The Deduction Paradigm
The deductive reasoning paradigm is focused on logical argu-
ments. These are arguments whose conclusions must necessarily
follow from their premises. That is to say, logic guarantees that a
valid conclusion is true if all of the premises are true. Whether the
premises are, in fact, true is neither here nor there. To be scored as
correct, participants in these experiments must assume the pre-
mises to be true, base their reasoning only on the premises (intro-
ducing no prior knowledge) and declare or produce as valid
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conclusions only statements which cannot logically be false given
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the truth of the premises. They must also accept the logician’s
interpretation of words in the English language such as some, if, or,
and not, regardless of how such words may be used in ordinary
discourse.
There are two variants of the method commonly in use today,
which can be termed the conclusion evaluation task and the
conclusion production task. There are also several versions of the
paradigm based on the kind of logic involved. One of the most
common is syllogistic reasoning, even though the system used
by Aristotle is of little more than historical interest to current
logicians. Such syllogisms have two premises and a conclusion,
such as:
Some A are B.
No B are C.
Therefore, some A are not C.
Each premise and the conclusion can take four different syntac-
tic forms, and the terms can be arranged in four orders, or figures,
making 256 syntactically distinct syllogisms. Only a small minor-
ity of these have conclusions that are logically valid. In the
evaluation task people are given whole syllogisms, such as the
above, and asked whether the conclusions necessarily follow. This
paradigm has been in use for many years, although typically only
a subset of syllogisms are studied. A recent study asking partici-
pants to evaluate conclusions to all possible syllogisms—syllo-
gisms whose conclusions could be true if the premises are true—
was reported by Evans, Handley, Harper, and Johnson-Laird
(1999). There is also a comprehensive study of the production task
in the literature (Johnson-Laird & Bara, 1984) in which all possible
premises pairs, in both orders, were presented, and participants
were asked to generate a conclusion of their own. Within the
production version of the paradigm, participants are typically
instructed to generate only conclusions that necessarily follow
from the premises given.
The other major version of the paradigm is built around standard
propositional logic of the kind to be found in elementary logical
textbooks (e.g., Lemmon, 1965). The bulk of these studies have
focused on arguments with conditional statements, such as:
If there is an A on the left, then there is a 4 on the right.
There is not a 4 on the right.
Therefore, there is not an A on the left.
979
However, a significant though much smaller set of studies have
looked at disjunctive arguments, such as:
There is an A on the left or there is a 4 on the right, or both.
There is not a 4 on the right.
Therefore, there is an A on the left.
As with syllogistic reasoning, one can again present a whole
argument, such as the above, for evaluation or else present just the
premises with an instruction to generate a necessary (or possible)
conclusion. A recent example of a study that looked at conditional
inference using both the evaluation and the production method is
that of Evans, Clibbens, and Rood (1995). There is also a literature
based around transitive and relational reasoning problems that are
deductive in nature (see Evans, Newstead, & Byrne, 1993, chap. 6,
for a review) but for which formal logics have not been written.
However, the logical properties of these reasoning systems can in
principle be formalized, using predicate logic if required. Although
this is trivially easy for linear syllogisms (three-term series prob-
lems), there are cases of relational inference that are hard to
capture in this way (see Johnson-Laird, 1983, pp. 240 –241).
Relational reasoning is a relatively small field in terms of the
number of studies reported and is not discussed in this article. I do,
however, include for the current purposes, the Wason selection
task (Wason, 1966) described later, even though this is not a purely
deductive reasoning task. However, it is a task that includes the
deductive instruction of necessity and has traditionally been stud-
ied by the same researchers for similar purposes as deductive
reasoning tasks proper.
Origins of the Paradigm: Logicism and Rationality
Having outlined the paradigm, one can now ask why psychol-
ogists would perform the many hundreds of deductive reasoning
experiments that have been published in such increasing numbers
over the years? To answer this, one must first examine the origin
of the paradigm. There is no question that the reason people
originally did such experiments was derived from a philosophical
and psychological tradition of logicism (see Henle, 1962), the
doctrine that logic provides the basis for rational human thought.
During the 1960s and 1970s, when Wason and others were devel-
oping the modern version of the paradigm, the influence of Piage-
tian theory in psychology was enormous. Piaget incorporated the
logicist tradition into this theory of cognitive development, pro-
posing that adults eventually developed formal operational think-
ing on the basis of abstract logical structures (Inhelder & Piaget,
1958). Other influential psychologists at this time were also not
content to limit the role of logic to that of a normative standard, but
prone to argue that human reasoning was invariably and inevitably
logical (see, e.g., Henle, 1962; Smedslund, 1970).
Given this standard, the investigation of people’s actual logical
competence using the deduction paradigm was a natural step to
take. However, it is questionable whether the standard logics (such
as the propositional and predicate calculi) adopted by psycholo-
gists for construction of their problems and scoring of good and
bad reasoning were ever appropriate for the analysis of natural
language arguments. These logics were developed by mathemati-
cians (Frege, 1952; Whitehead & Russell, 1925) primarily for the
 980
purpose of processing formal axioms to prove theorems. Where
scientific theories are axiomitized, for example, logic is a form of
mathematics that allows one to test for consistency (i.e., absence of
contradiction) and to deduce conclusions (e.g., predictions) whose
truth depends exclusively on the truth of the axioms. The kind of
reasoning that human beings engage in, on the other hand, is based
not on axioms but on beliefs in which there are varying degrees of
confidence, leading to conclusions that may be probabilistic and
provisional in nature. In spite of this, standard formal logics
somehow became the basis for testing the rationality of people’s
reasoning in psychologists’ laboratories.
When psychologists started to use the deduction paradigm reg-
ularly, it soon became apparent that their participants performed
very poorly on these tasks. The conclusion that was initially drawn
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was that there was something wrong with the participants rather
than with the normative system. Hence, the conclusion of psychol-
ogists in the earlier work in this field was that people were illogical
and therefore irrational, causing them to attack the logicist ortho-
doxy of the time. A striking parallel is observed in the study of
judgment and decision making at about the same time. Psycholo-
gists studying decision making in the 1960s were generally agreed
that economic decision theory and probability calculus provided
the correct normative theory for rational choice and judgment, and
they also agreed that people were broadly rational as measured by
these standards (Peterson & Beach, 1967). This comfortable con-
sensus was subsequently undermined in the 1970s and 1980s by
the famous heuristics and biases research program of Amos Tver-
sky and Daniel Kahneman (see Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky,
1982). Tversky and Kahneman (1973, 1974, 1983; Kahneman &
Tversky, 1972, 1982) argued in a series of influential articles that
people’s rationality was bounded by cognitive constraints, leading
them to use short-cut simple heuristics when making decisions
under uncertainty. These heuristics in turn were linked to a whole
series of cognitive biases. By the 1980s, bias research had become
fashionable in the study of probabilistic as well as deductive
reasoning.
Peter Wason is generally, and quite rightly, regarded as the
founder of the modern field of the psychology of reasoning. His
work in the 1960s and 1970s was clearly motivated by a reaction
against the Piagetian/logicist consensus of the time and an inten-
tion to demonstrate bias and irrationality in human reasoning. He
introduced first the 2-4-6 problem (Wason, 1960) and later the four
card selection task (Wason, 1966) to demonstrate that contrary to
strictures of philosophers of science (e.g., Popper, 1959) that
scientific thinking required falsification of hypotheses, people
were prone to a verification bias (later to be known as confirmation
bias; see Klayman, 1995). Popper’s system was based on deduc-
tive logic and violations of falsificationism were clearly seen by
Wason as logical errors.
The selection task has become probably the most investigated
single problem in the whole literature on the psychology of rea-
soning (see Evans, Newstead, & Byrne, 1993; Manktelow, 1999,
for reviews). In Wason’s original version, people were told that
four cards each had a letter on one side and a number on the other
and that the following rule applied to the cards: If there is a vowel
on one side of the card then there is an even number on the other
side of the card. The four cards displayed might have the values A
(vowel), T (consonant), 4 (even number), and 7 (odd number) on
their visible sides. The instruction was to choose those cards and
EVANS
only those cards that needed to be turned over in order to decide
whether the rule was true or false. Although traditionally given a
logical analysis, this task involves more than simple deductive
reasoning. Participants must first understand the falsification prin-
ciple: It is necessary to turn over cards whose hidden values might
falsify the rule. The falsifying combination is a vowel together
with an odd number. The only cards that lead one to find such a
case are the A and the 7, which should thus be chosen. However,
this solution is very hard to find and is typically given by 10% or
less of university students participating in such experiments. Typ-
ical answers were A alone or A and 3, which were interpreted by
Wason as conforming to an erroneous verification principle.
From a contemporary standpoint, what is particularly interesting
about Wason’s (1968, 1983) earlier selection task articles is that he
did not question the consensus that logic was the correct normative
theory for human reasoning. Instead, he argued in effect that
people were illogical and therefore irrational, as the following
quotations demonstrate. Wason (1968) commenting on results
from a selection task study stated:
The results are . . . disquieting. If Piaget is right then the subjects in
the present investigation should have reached the stage of formal
operations. A person who is thinking in these terms will take account
of the possible and the hypothetical by formulating propositions about
them. He will be able to isolate variables . . . and subject them to
combinatorial analysis. But this is exactly what subjects in the present
experiment singularly fail to do. . . . Could it be that the stage of
formal operations is not completely achieved at adolescence, even
among intelligent individuals? (p. 281)
The first and last sentences of this quote are particularly inter-
esting. The results are disquieting, presumably, because they signal
some inadequacy or irrationality in the participants. The last sen-
tence could either be taken as a deferential and daring questioning
of the great Piagetian theory, or as an ironic understatement. Given
Wason’s later explicit attacks on Piaget (e.g., Wason, 1977) the
latter is more likely, although the wording is still an indication of
the dominance of Piaget at this time. The equation of illogicality
with irrationality is even clearer in the writings of Wason (1983):
The selection task reflects [a tendency toward irrationality in argu-
ment] to the extent that the subjects get it wrong. . . . It could be
argued that irrationality rather than rationality is the norm. People all
too readily succumb to logical fallacies. (p. 59)
Thus, one can see that at the start of the modern study of
deduction, there was a clear consensus that logic was the norma-
tive standard against which to assess the rationality of human
reasoning. The psychological debate was about whether people
were in fact logical or illogical. Whichever view one took, the
deductive reasoning paradigm made sense. It was important to
establish the extent of people’s logicality, and presenting them
with logical tasks to solve was the obvious way to discover this.
The review that follows is organized into three main sections.
First, I conduct a brief survey of the kinds of empirical findings
that have been typically observed with the paradigm. Second, I
discuss some of the main theoretical issues that have arisen as
psychologists have sought to explain the mental processes under-
lying performance on this task. Third, I review the emerging
debate about rationality in this field and the extent to which it
 LOGIC AND REASONING 981

should be linked with logicality. In a concluding section I assess
the value of the deduction paradigm and consider its future.
Empirical Findings
The primary focus of this article is on the development of
theoretical ideas about deduction, logic, and rationality that have
motivated the use of the deduction paradigm and the interpretation
of findings from it. However, it is useful at this point to provide a
brief review of the kinds of findings that have emerged from
experiments on deductive reasoning. For this purpose I draw a
broad distinction between abstract and thematic tasks using the
deductive reasoning paradigm proper. I then consider findings with
the Wason selection task.
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Evans, Newstead, & Byrne, 1993). Recent examples of such
findings with abstract reasoning tasks are available in the litera-
ture. For example, using capital letters as the terms, Evans, Han-
dley, et al. (1999) asked people to evaluate all possible classical
syllogisms in an argument such as:
All A are B.
Some C are not B.
Therefore, some A are not C.
Participants were then asked to judge whether the conclusion was
necessary given the premises. This study also introduced the
unusual alternative of asking people to decide whether a conclu-

sion was possible given the premises. The study endorsed the
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well-established finding that people regard as valid many syllo-

Abstract Reasoning Tasks and the Issue of Competence gisms whose conclusions do not necessarily follow (as in the
above example), although it also discovered a subset of fallacies
I have argued (Evans, 1991) that reasoning research is largely
that people do not endorse (see Figure 1). There was also little
organized around three main questions: How competent are un-
evidence to suggest that participants fully understood the logical
trained reasoners in deductive tasks, what kinds of systematic
distinction between necessity and possibility.
biases influence their inferences, and to what extent are responses
Proneness to fallacies has also been claimed in studies using the con-
influenced by content and context? The influence of content and
ditional inference paradigm. Again, a recent example of study using
context is considered in the following section and has much
abstract problems is provided by Evans et al. (1995). People were
bearing on the current theoretical debates in the field reviewed
asked to evaluate each of four inferences, presented in abstract form:
subsequently. However, issues about competence and bias have
been extensively studied using so called abstract reasoning tasks, Modus ponens:
presented with artificial problem materials in the absence of fa-
miliar contexts. Despite the increasing interest in pragmatic fac- If the letter is A, then the number is 4.
tors, a significant number of abstract reasoning experiments persist The letter is A, therefore the number is 4.
in the literature to the present.
It might seem to the uninitiated (as indeed it seemed to earlier Denial of the antecedent:
researchers working in this field) that the question of logical
If the letter is G, then the number is 7.
competence should be easily established. People can be given tasks
with a solution defined in formal logic to determine whether they The number is not G, therefore the number is not 7.
provide that solution. The competence question of interest was,
incidentally, always that of whether people untrained in formal
logic could reason logically. It is standard practice to screen out
participants who have attended classes in logic. It is also important
to note here that the deduction paradigm is not what problem-
solving researchers would call a well-defined task. People are not
supplied with logical rules and asked to manipulate them in the
manner of some experiments reported by Newell and Simon
(1972). Instead, they are simply asked to draw necessary conclu-
sions from premises. The reason for this is that the competence
sought is an inherent logicality that must be built into the mind
according to logicist thinking.
The use of abstract reasoning tasks may be seen as ideal for this
purpose because logical reasoning should be a domain-general
process independent of prior knowledge and belief about problem
content. Indeed, the introduction of pragmatically rich contexts
might be thought to introduce biases that could disguise the un-
derlying competence. On this basis, it must be said that logical
performance in abstract reasoning tasks is generally quite poor.
Figure 1. Percentage endorsement of conclusions as necessarily follow-
Whether such poor performance indicates lack of competence is
ing from syllogistic premises in the Evans, Handley, et al. (1999) study.
the subject of much debate and is reviewed in a later section. For N ⫽ necessary (valid) conclusions (must be true if the premises are true);
the moment, note the facts. The first is that people endorse many PS ⫽ Possible strong (possible syllogisms that are frequently endorsed);
fallacies; that is, they draw conclusions that could be true given the PW ⫽ Possible weak (possible syllogisms that are infrequently endorsed);
premises but that do not need to be true. This is a general finding I ⫽ Impossible conclusions (cannot be true if the premises are true); Ex2 ⫽
in the literatures on both syllogistic and conditional reasoning (see Experiment 2; Ex3 ⫽ Experiment 3.
 982 EVANS
Affirmation of the consequent:
If the letter is T, then the number is 1.
The number is 1, therefore the letter is T.
Modus tollens:
If the letter is P, then the number is 2.
The number is not 2, therefore the letter is not P.
In standard logic, modus ponens and modus tollens are regarded
as valid arguments, but affirmation of the consequent and denial of
the antecedent are regarded as fallacies. On this basis, as reported
by Evans et al. (1995) and many other studies, fallacies are
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commonplace. In particular, the affirmation of the consequent
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inference can be endorsed very heavily. However, studies (e.g.,
Evans, Newstead, & Byrne, 1993) of abstract conditional inference
also show that whereas the valid inference modus ponens is made
with near universal support, modus tollens rates are considerably
lower, typically around 60% for university student participant
populations. Substantial numbers of participants say that the mo-
dus tollens conclusion does not follow. The explanation of the
difficulty of modus tollens has been central to theoretical argu-
ments about the nature of conditional reasoning.
With regard to deductive competence, the striking finding in this
literature, as already indicated, is that participants not trained in
formal logic make many errors when their performance is com-
pared with the dictates of standard textbook logic. Despite the
widespread observation of error, however, there is evidence of an
irreducible minimal deductive competence for which psycholo-
gists must provide an explanation (Evans & Over, 1996a, 1997).
That is to say, participants untrained in formal logic can establish
the validity of arguments at well above chance rates. The ability to
do so, however, is strongly linked to measure of general intelli-
gence (Stanovich, 1999). This finding poses problems for any
argument that an innate logicality is required to support normal
cognition. Such an adaptation should be fixed and not linked to
highly heritable differences in measured intelligence (see also
Over & Evans, 2000).
In general, the logical errors observed in participant studies are
not random but systematic, leading to interest in the study of
biases. A bias in the deduction literature is normally defined as the
systematic influence of some logically irrelevant feature of the
task. The term is problematic on at least two counts. First, bias is
defined relative to logic structure and would seem hence to pre-
suppose logic as a normative standard. Second, the everyday use of
the term bias is pejorative, suggesting error and irrationality.
Hence, it is all too easy (and fully understandable) for observers to
draw the conclusion that anyone reporting a study of reasoning
biases is (a) asserting that people are irrational and (b) asserting
that logic is the appropriate normative standard. This problem lies
at the heart of some of the rationality debate about reasoning
research, which I discuss in a later section.
In fact, neither conclusion (a) or (b) are valid deductions,
although they were undoubtedly made by earlier investigators. The
conventions of the deduction paradigm require that logical struc-
ture is controlled so that nonlogical psychological influences can
be identified. No one, for example, would be impressed that
participants accepted Syllogism A with a believable conclusion
more readily than Syllogism B if it was also the case that A’s
conclusion was valid and B’s was not. Hence, the convention of
referring to systematic nonlogical influences as biases has been
maintained even though bias researchers may not necessarily be-
lieve that they provide evidence of irrationality and may even
argue the precise opposite (e.g., Evans, Over, & Manktelow,
1993). The reader is hence asked to suspend judgment on the
implications of biases for rationality, pending later discussion of
this issue.
In the case of abstract conditional reasoning, biases have been
demonstrated by introducing negative components into the rules so
that people are asked to reason with four rules of the form: if p then
q, if p then not q, if not p then q, and if not p then not q. For
example, one well-known bias has been variously termed as neg-
ative conclusion bias (Evans, 1982) or double negation effect
(Evans, Clibbens, & Rood, 1995). Take the example of modus
tollens mentioned earlier:
If the letter is P, then the number is 2
The number is not 2, therefore the letter is not P.
Suppose a negation is inserted into the antecedent of the rule:
If the letter is not P, then the number is 2.
The number is not 2, therefore the letter is P.
This problem is much more difficult than the modus tollens prob-
lem with the standard affirmative conditional. Evans et al. (1995,
Experiment 1) presented both problems to participants and found
that the former argument was endorsed by 74% of participants,
whereas 45% endorsed the latter—a typical result even though
both arguments are equally valid. I (Evans, 1982) labeled this a
negative conclusion bias, suggesting that people prefer to endorse
negative rather than affirmative conclusions in the interest of
caution. However, Evans et al. (1995) found the effect mostly on
inferences requiring denial of a negative component, suggesting
that bias was due to difficulty in processing a double negation (not
not P, therefore P, in the above example). This interpretation has
been questioned, however, by a recent meta-analysis of conditional
inference tasks (Schroyens, Schaeken, & d’Ydewalle, 2001).
The so called negations paradigm can also be used to demon-
strate another well-established effect known as matching bias
(reviewed by Evans, 1998), in which the task used is a truth table
task (see Evans, Legrenzi, & Girotto, 1999) or the Wason selection
task. This phenomenon was discovered the early 1970s (Evans,
1972; Evans & Lynch, 1973) and consists of a tendency to pay
attention to features of the problem information that have a lexical
match with items explicitly named in the conditional statement.
For example, if asked to find a falsifying example of the statement,
“If the letter is B, then the number is not 4,” almost everyone
correctly says B and 4. When asked to falsify the statement, “If the
letter is not D, then the number is 7,” however, few people give the
logically equivalent answer by pairing a letter that is not a D with
a number that is not a 7 (e.g., T5), and most suggest D7. Recent
research suggests that the phenomenon is due to difficulty in
processing implicit negations (see Evans, Clibbens, & Rood, 1996;
Handley, Dennis, Evans, & Capon, 2000; Schaeken & Schroyens,
2000).
 LOGIC AND REASONING
Biases of the kind described here demonstrate systematic atten-
tion to attributes of the problem that are independent of their
logical form. Hence, they indicate error in the context of the
instructions presented on the standard deduction paradigm but not
necessarily irrationality, for the reasons given earlier. Even taking
all these biases into account, there is still irreducible evidence for
some deductive competence in these tasks that are generally solved
at above chance rates (see Evans & Over, 1996a, 1997). However,
it is clear that any psychological theory that gave an account of
competence without addressing the cause of these various biases
would be incomplete to say the least.
The Influence of Content and Context
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In addition to studying deductive competence and biases, the
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other major question pursued in the experimental literature on
deductive reasoning concerns the influence of content and context.
Such influences are necessarily nonlogical because the deduction
paradigm requires people to make inferences based on logical form
for arguments whose particular content and context is irrelevant.
However, the influence of context is highly pervasive; it led
Stanovich (1999) recently to propose a fundamental computational
bias comprising a tendency to contextualize all problems with
regard to prior knowledge and belief. A good example is the so
called belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning (see, e.g., Evans,
Barston, & Pollard, 1983; Klauer, Musch, & Naumer, 2000; New-
stead, Pollard, & Allen, 1992). In a typical experiment, participants
are asked to decide whether a presented conclusion follows logi-
cally from some premises (belief bias has also been shown in
conclusion production tasks). Despite careful deductive reasoning
instructions, people endorse far more conclusions as valid when
they also accord with prior belief, especially when the conclusion
given is a potential fallacy (see Table 1).
Traditionally, this phenomenon is described as a bias to endorse
believable conclusions, but recent research suggests this may be
inaccurate. In fact, people have a strong tendency to endorse
fallacious conclusions when arguments have abstract or belief-
Table 1
Evidence of Belief Bias in Reasoning: Example Syllogisms From
the Work of Evans, Barston, and Pollard (1983) With
Percentage of Acceptance of Conclusions as Valid
Example Acceptance
Valid–believable
No police dogs are vicious.
Some highly trained dogs are vicious.
Therefore, some highly trained dogs are not police dogs. 89%
Valid–unbelievable
No nutritional things are inexpensive.
Some vitamin tablets are inexpensive.
Therefore, some vitamin tablets are not nutritional. 56%
Invalid–believable
No addictive things are inexpensive.
Some cigarettes are inexpensive.
Therefore, some addictive things are not cigarettes. 71%
Invalid–unbelievable
No millionaires are hard workers.
Some rich people are hard workers.
Therefore, some millionaires are not rich people. 10%
983
neutral content, and the typical belief bias effect is due to suppres-
sion of fallacious conclusions when they are unbelievable (see
Evans, Handley, & Harper, 2001; Evans, Handley, et al., 1999;
Klauer et al., 2000). It may thus be regarded as a debiasing effect
of unbelievable conclusions. Nevertheless, conclusion believabil-
ity is clearly irrelevant to the logical task as set and should have no
influence if people were reasoning logically. Syllogistic reasoning
is also known to be biased by syntactic factors including the nature
of the quantifiers used in the premises (see Chater & Oaksford,
1999) and the order in which terms are mentioned (Johnson-Laird
& Bara, 1984).
Content effects can also be demonstrated in conditional infer-
ence problems of the kind discussed earlier. For example, the
normally universal modus ponens can be suppressed in certain
contexts as first shown by Byrne (1989, 1991). Consider these
statements:
If Ruth has an essay deadline to meet she will work late in the
library.
Ruth has an essay deadline to meet.
The obvious modus ponens inference is that Ruth will work late in
the library. However, adding an additional premise reduces signif-
icantly the frequency with which this inference is drawn.
If Ruth has an essay deadline to meet she will work late in the
library.
If the library stays open, Ruth will work late in the library.
Ruth has an essay deadline to meet.
The extra premise suggests a disabling condition that may
prevent p leading to q in the original conditional. This is an
example of nonmonotonic or defeasible inference, in which a
deduction is effectively withdrawn in the light of new evidence.
This can be interpreted on the grounds that people construct
limited mental models to support their inferences. The additional
premise causes people explicitly to model a possibility that blocks
the inference (i.e., that the library is closed). An alternative inter-
pretation of the phenomenon is that the additional premise under-
mines belief in the original conditional (Politzer & Braine, 1991),
and there is independent evidence that people are reluctant to draw
conclusions from premises that they believe to be false (Thomp-
son, 2001). Subsequent research has shown that people appear to
reason probabilistically, reducing their rating of the likelihood of
the conclusion when such a second premise is introduced (George,
1997, 1999; Stevenson & Over, 1995).
There is also much other evidence of context effects in condi-
tional inference. These influences can arise from additional pre-
mises, from contextual information, or from inherent beliefs about
the terms in the conditional premises present, such as the suffi-
ciency and necessity relationships between the events described as
p and q (Cummins, Lubart, Alksnis, & Rist, 1991; Markovits,
1986; Thompson, 1994, 2000; Thompson & Mann, 1995). New-
stead, Ellis, Evans, and Dennis (1997) investigated conditional
reasoning in a variety of contexts (promises, tips, threats, and
warnings), in which conditional premises were provided as quoted
speech attributed to an individual in a small scenario. One of the
findings in this study was that all four conditional inferences were
 984 EVANS
endorsed more frequently for promises and threats than for tips and
warnings. For an illustration of these types of conditionals, con-
sider the following examples:
Promise (father to son): “If you pass the exam, I will buy
you a new bicycle.”
Tip (friend to friend): “If you pass the exam, your
father will buy you a new
bicycle.”
Threat (boss to employee): “If you are late for work again, I
will fire you.”
Warning (colleague to colleague): “If you are late for work again,
the boss will fire you.”
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Newstead et al. (1997) speculated that promises are stronger
than tips and threats are stronger than warnings because with
promises and threats, the speaker is perceived to have control over
the consequent event, an hypothesis confirmed by a subsequent
study in which the two factors were separated (Evans & Twyman-
Musgrove, 1998). These findings also support the idea of proba-
bilistic reasoning in that it would seem, for example, that a tip
raises the probability of q given p, but not as much as does a
promise.
The comments in this section concerning evidence for prob-
abilistic reasoning amount to no more than the observation that
people seem to have degrees of belief in premises and conclu-
sions rather than treating them as true or false as required by
standard logic. It is not in itself an argument that the probability
calculus can provide an alternative normative framework for
human reasoning, although there are some authors who clearly
wish to make the argument for the case of conditional reasoning
(see Oaksford, Chater, & Larkin, 2000). The point here is that
these probabilistic responses sit uneasily with the deduction
paradigm, in which people are asked to judge the necessity of
conclusions. As Evans, Over, and Handley (in press) have also
pointed out, such responses are also hard to explain with a
theory of conditional reasoning, such as that proposed by
Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002), which is based on the idea
that inferences follow from an extension of logical possibilities
that are considered by the reasoner.
It is also relevant to note here that one argument that has been
used against the logicist framework is that real world reasoning is
defeasible (Oaksford & Chater, 1991). Although there have been
attempts to develop nonmonotonic logics to deal with defeasible
inference, they are certainly not permitted in the standard logic that
psychologists have tended to use as their normative reference. The
studies of suppression of modus ponens and other inferences
mentioned above can be seen as indirect tests of defeasible infer-
ence. More directly, one can ask people to make a conditional
inference and then introduce information that contradicts the con-
clusion drawn. The question then is, what do people give up to
resolve the contradiction? In general, they tend to disbelieve the
conditional premise rather than the minor premise (Elio & Pelle-
tier, 1997; Politzer & Carles, 2001). The latter study also provides
evidence—again—that people respond to and express degrees of
belief rather than making absolute deductions about truth and
falsity.
Wason Selection Task
The Wason selection task, described earlier, has become the
single most investigated task in the whole psychological literature
on reasoning. Indeed, some researchers seem to confine their
studies of reasoning entirely to this problem. Interest in the abstract
selection task has been maintained because it is a convenient
problem on which to demonstrate and investigate matching bias
(Evans, 1998); it has also been a focus for debate about informa-
tion and decision-theoretic accounts of reasoning, discussed in the
Theoretical Issues in the Study of Deduction section.
The major interest in the selection task, however, concerns
thematic or realistic versions of the task. It was discovered early on
(Wason & Shapiro, 1971) that this normally very difficult task may
be solved much more readily when framed in some realistic
context, leading to claims of a thematic facilitation effect (Wason
& Johnson-Laird, 1972). However, even an earlier review of
research on the thematic selection task (Griggs, 1983) cast doubt
on the idea that it was a process of logical reasoning that was being
facilitated. This was because there was no evidence of transfer
when the abstract task was presented to participants immediately
after they had solved a thematic version. It also emerged that
simply making the selection task thematic did not always result in
facilitation. For example, Griggs and Cox (1982) failed to replicate
Wason and Shapiro’s (1971) results with a slightly amended
American version of their materials. They did, however, discover
an alternative thematic version of the task, known as the drinking
age rule that has proved highly reliable. Remarkably, the critical
factor in the framing of such reliably facilitatory versions went
unnoticed in the literature for many years. Such problems are not
just thematic; they change the task to one concerned with reason-
ing about rules and regulations—a form of reasoning known as
deontic to logicians—rather than hypothetical reasoning about
truth and falsity (Manktelow & Over, 1991). For example, in the
drinking age rule, participants are asked to imagine they are police
officers observing people drinking in a bar and checking to ensure
that the following rule is being followed:
If a person is drinking beer, then that person must be over 19 years of
age (if p then q). The four cards represent drinkers with the beverage
written on one side and the age on the other, and the exposed sides
show the following:
Drinking beer Drinking coke 21 years of age 16 years of age
(p) (not p) (q) (not q)
Although the task is one of deontic logic, the correct choice is
still analyzed as being the p and not q cards—in this case the beer
drinker and the underage drinker. Griggs and Cox (1982) found
that around 75% of participants chose these cards—a dramatic
facilitation of performance. Later research (see Evans, Newstead,
& Byrne, 1993, chap. 4) has shown that there are several condi-
tions required to achieve this effect. For example, the deontic
phrasing and “search for violators” set does not facilitate with
abstract versions of the task. Also, if the minimal context for
checking the scenario (in this case, the police officer role) is
removed, card choices with the drinking age rule are similar to
those on an abstract control task (Pollard & Evans, 1987).
There has subsequently been a huge amount of experimental
work on realistic versions of the selection task (see Evans, New-
 LOGIC AND REASONING
stead, & Byrne, 1993; Manktelow, 1999, for reviews) that shows
a rather complex picture. Thematic versions may produce no
facilitation if thematic materials fail to induce helpful prior expe-
rience (Evans, 1995; Griggs & Cox, 1983; Manktelow & Evans,
1979), and they may produce alternative nonlogical selection pat-
terns when the participants are given a shifted perspective in the
scenario (Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992; Manktelow and Over, 1991;
Politzer & Nguyen-Xuan, 1992). For example, in the Manktelow
and Over (1991) study, participants were given the following rule
embedded in a scenario about a high-priced street shop: “If you
spend more than £100 then you may take a free gift” (p. 98).
The four cards each represented a particular customer and
showed on one side how much had been spent and on the other
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whether a gift had been taken. When given the perspective of a
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customer who suspected the shop of not honoring its pledge, most
participants chose to investigate the customers who spent more
than £100 and those who did not receive a free gift. This looks like
the classic thematic facilitation effect, as these choices are consid-
ered logically correct. However, when cued to the perspective of a
store detective suspecting customers, participants switched their
interests to the other two cards instead. In this group, they tended
to investigate customers who had not spent £100 and those who
had taken a gift. Manktelow and Over (1991) offered a decision-
theoretic interpretation of the result: The participants’ choices
made sense given the goal of their cued perspective. It is interest-
ing to note, however, that this choice pattern is neither the logical
one nor one that is commonly observed on the abstract version of
the task. This confirms Griggs’s (1983) earlier conclusion that the
effect of enriched content is not simply that of facilitating logical
reasoning.
Because selection task experiments have been central to several
theoretical debates in the reasoning literature, I consider them
further in the following section. I simply note at this point that
research over the past 30 years or so has served to undermine
confidence in the logicist framework that supported Wason’s
(1968, 1983) earlier claims for irrational behavior on the selection
task. Work on this task has contributed strongly to a major debate
about whether reasoning is based on mechanisms that are domain-
general or domain-specific in nature. I examine this issue below.
Theoretical Issues in the Study of Deduction
I now consider some of the major theoretical proposals that have
emerged in the study of deductive reasoning, broken down into
three subsections. In the first, a debate close to the logicist origin
of the paradigm is discussed. This involves an argument about
whether deductive competence is based on the possession of
natural rule-based logical systems for reasoning or on the manip-
ulation of mental models. In the next section I consider adapta-
tionist and ecological approaches to reasoning that view reasoning
as responsive to meeting the demands of the environment. Authors
are strongly divided on two issues: the extent to which reasoning
is domain specific or domain general and the precise role that
evolution may have played in shaping effective reasoning proce-
dures. In the final section I examine dual process theories of
reasoning. This structure is, however, somewhat arbitrary; there
are rich interconnections between the theoretical ideas discussed in
these separate subsections.
985
Most of the authors whose work is described in this section have
presented new analyses and (usually) new experiments which they
have found to be convincing evidence for their point of view, but
which opponents have equally found open to criticism or prob-
lematic interpretation. Because it is not the purpose of this review
to adjudicate between specific theoretical positions, little space is
given to description or assessment of these experiments. The
objective here is to convey the nature of the issues and the major
kinds of theoretical approaches that have been presented to address
them. What is of most interest is the implications these theories
hold for the role of logic in rational assessment of human reason-
ing competence. These implications are revisited in the Deductive
Reasoning and the Rationality Debate section.
The Competence Agenda: Mental Rules Versus Mental
Models
It is clear from the above section that most of the experimental
research using the deduction paradigm in the past 30 years has
been focused on the study of biases and content effects that reflect
nonlogical processes. However, one major theoretical debate in the
past 20 years has preserved interest in the issue of deductive
competence. In the early days, authors were prone to assert that
logic was the basis for human reasoning (Henle, 1962; Inhelder
and Piaget, 1958), and it was implicit in the discussions of exper-
imental articles at this time that only logical errors needed to be
explained. Of course, this approach would not satisfy the demands
of contemporary cognitive science for two main reasons. First of
all, there is no single system of logic; philosophers and logicians
have proposed many alternatives. Second, it is not sufficient to
propose that someone possesses a logic— even if the logic is
defined. It is also necessary to know what particular cognitive
representations and processes are involved in order to permit an act
of reasoning to occur.
In fact, two major systems of rule-based mental logic have been
developed that meet these criteria, that of Rips (e.g., 1983, 1994)
and of Braine and O’Brien (e.g., Braine, 1978; Braine & O’Brien,
1991, 1998). These systems suppose that human reasoning pro-
ceeds like a logical proof, using rules of inferences stored in a
mental logic. However, some reasoning is direct and simple,
whereas other kinds require indirect suppositional inferences,
which are prone to error. This work builds on the Piagetian and
logicist tradition but extends and develops it in very significant
ways. First, the modern work offers a mechanism (in Rips’s, 1994,
case, instantiated as a working computer program) by which de-
duction can be achieved. Second, it supplements this basic mech-
anism with a variety of proposals about pragmatic process in
reasoning.
Johnson-Laird (1983) presented a seminal and radical alterna-
tive to this framework based on mental model theory. In this book
he described and criticized the doctrine of mental logic, referring
to earlier versions and predecessors of the contemporary mental
logic theories referred to above. This was the earliest major attack
on logicism in the field and included the following arguments that
are just as relevant today: People make logical errors and fallacies
that must be explained; people are influenced by nonlogical heu-
ristics; reasoning is influenced by problem content. He also asked,
If there is a logic in the mind, where does it come from? It seems
unlikely that it could be learned, as mental logicians argue for the
 986
presence of logic as a precondition to understanding the world.
(There is an analogy here with Chomsky’s nativism— e.g., the case
for an innate module for processing language; Chomsky, 1986). If
mental logic is innate, where is the account of how it could have
evolved?
Johnson-Laird (1983) proposed an account of deductive com-
petence based only on a fundamental semantic principle: An
argument is valid if there is no counterexample to it. In his system,
mental models represent possible situations in the world. Hence,
what was required in a psychological theory of reasoning was for
people to represent the premises of an argument as mental models
from which a conclusion could be derived. Deductive competence
was achieved by a search for counterexamples; in other words,
Johnson-Laird suggested that people would try to discover models
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in which the premises but not the putative conclusion was true. If
no such counterexample was found, then the argument would be
declared valid. Hence, deductive reasoning could be achieved
without the need for any logical rules. A detailed mental model
theory of syllogistic reasoning was developed and tested by
Johnson-Laird and Bara (1984), followed by model theory ac-
counts of propositional and relational inference (Johnson-Laird &
Byrne, 1991).
Mental model theory was offered by Johnson-Laird (1983) as a
radical alternative to mental logic. It is true that researchers in this
tradition—who now predominate in contemporary study of the
psychology of reasoning—pay much less explicit attention to
issues about logicality than the founders of the field. However,
they still mostly use the standard deduction paradigm with its
logical reasoning instructions. It is also a moot point whether
mental model theory really succeeded in dispelling logicism. Some
authors have argued that it simply replaces a logic system based on
syntactic proof methods with one based on semantic proofs. For
example, Oaksford and Chater (1995) stated:
Mental logics and mental models embody logic as a computational-
level theory. This is self-evident for the mental logic approach. But it
also follows immediately for the mental models approach, given that
the goal of mental model theory is to provide a mechanism for
conducting logically valid deductive inference. (p. 133)
More recently, Evans et al. (in press) have criticized the implicit
logicality of the latest version of the model theory of conditionals,
that of Johnson-Laird and Byrne (2002). The latter authors asserted
that the core meaning of the conditional if p then q is captured by
a scheme that allows three logical possibilities: p and q, not p and
q, and not p and not q. Evans et al. (in press) argued that this makes
the conditional fully equivalent to the material implication in a
two-valued propositional logic, thus inheriting the paradoxes and
problems of material conditionals identified by philosophers (Edg-
ington, 1995).
Model theorists have proposed explanations of many of the
biases and content effects already discussed in this article, includ-
ing belief bias effects in syllogistic reasoning (Oakhill, Johnson-
Laird, & Garnham, 1989) and pragmatic influences in conditional
reasoning (Byrne, 1999; Byrne & McEleney, 2000). In contrast
with other theoretical camps, relatively little interest has been
shown in the Wason selection task, although model-based expla-
nations of the main findings have been offered (Johnson-Laird,
1995). It is probably fair to say that mental model theory has
provided the major framework or paradigm within which current
EVANS
research on reasoning is conducted, certainly by European psy-
chologists (see recently edited volumes by Garcia-Madruga, Car-
riedo, & Conzales-Labra, 2000; Schaeken, de Vooght, Vandieren-
donck, & d’Ydewalle, 2000).
Following the arguments of Johnson-Laird (1983), a major
debate ensued between rule theorists and model theorists, filling
numerous journal pages. Reviews of this debate can be found in
Evans, Newstead, and Byrne (1993, chap. 3) as well as in Evans
and Over (1996a, 1997). The reader is also directed to peer review
treatments accompanying the articles by Johnson-Laird and Byrne
(2001) and by Evans and Over (1997) for coverage of relevant
issues. Much of the debate involves specific disputes about par-
ticular explanations offered by either side for experimental find-
ings. Some observers have questioned the value of this debate. One
view, already indicated, is that mental model theory is really a
form of mental logic itself, not distinguishable from rule-based
mental logics as a computational level account of deduction (Oaks-
ford & Chater, 1995). It has also been suggested that neither theory
is sufficiently well-formulated as to be strictly testable and that
therefore attempts to decide empirically between the two are futile
(Evans & Over, 1996a, 1997).
The relevance of this debate for the present purpose is the extent
to which it keeps alive the rationale for the deductive reasoning
paradigm. It was very clear in the early writings of Rips (e.g.,
1984) and Johnson-Laird (e.g., 1983) that they shared a common
agenda in which deductive reasoning was considered to be central
to human intelligence and a theoretical account of deductive com-
petence of commensurate importance. However, as research in the
deduction paradigm has produced ever more evidence of domain-
specific and nonlogical processes, so too have the proposals of
both rule and model theorists moved away from strictly deductive
accounts. Rule theorists, for example, have not claimed exclusivity
for the influence of their mental logic on human reasoning and
have progressively emphasized the role of invited inferences,
pragmatic reasoning schemas, domain-specific rules and even
mental models (see Braine & O’Brien, 1998).
In the mental models tradition, the notion of validation by
searching for counterexamples is a key part of the account of
deductive competence. However, evidence has been adduced that
in some contexts at least, the tendency to do so is actually very
weak. For example, Evans, Handley, et al. (1999; see Figure 1)
discovered that some fallacious syllogisms (ones whose conclu-
sions could be true but need not be true given the premises) are
consistently endorsed as frequently as are valid syllogisms, and
others are endorsed as infrequently as are impossible syllogisms
(whose conclusions must be false given the premises). This sug-
gests that participants only consider one model of the premises,
declaring the offered conclusion as valid if it is represented in this
model. The fallacies frequently made are those in which the model
of the premises that comes to mind includes the conclusion and
those that are rejected are ones in which the model that occurs to
people excludes the conclusion. Doubts about conclusion valida-
tion were also supported in the study of Newstead, Handley, and
Buck (1999), although some recent evidence has gone the other
way (Bucciarelli & Johnson-Laird, 1999).
Findings of this kind have led to the suggestions that reasoning
is by default inductive or probabilistic and that explicit deductive
reasoning occurs only when people make a conscious strategic
effort under instructions (Evans, 2000). There has been an empha-
 LOGIC AND REASONING
sis on errors and illusions that may occur because of incomplete
representation of possibilities in mental models (Handley & Evans,
2000; Johnson-Laird & Savary, 1999). The mental model theory
has also been broadened to give accounts of probabilistic reason-
ing (Girotto & Gonzales, 2001; Johnson-Laird, Legrenzi, Girotto,
Legrenzi, & Caverni, 1999), suggesting that deduction is better
seen as a special case of the application of model-based reasoning
strategies rather than as the core of intellectual activity.
In conclusion, the theoretical debate between rule theory and
model theory remains unresolved and perhaps irresolvable, al-
though the model theory has arguably won more influence among
currently active researchers. Though originally proposed as com-
peting accounts of a core deductive competence, the proposals and
investigations of the theorists have moved progressively toward
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broader accounts of human reasoning in which domain-specific
and nondeductive processes have received increasing emphasis.
Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches
Within the past 10 to 15 years, a number of authors have
proposed approaches to reasoning research that make radically
different use of the deduction paradigm. These approaches also
have profound implications for the debate about normative ratio-
nality, which I explore later. Here, I consider briefly the nature of
these approaches that have in common the idea that people’s
behavior reflects ecological rationality; that is, they are well
adapted to their environment.
One major program of work (see Oaksford & Chater, 1998)
derives from the rational analysis tradition of Anderson (e.g.,
1990) and incorporates the notion of bounded rationality (Simon,
1982). The rational analysis approach proceeds from the assump-
tion that cognitive processes approximate a normatively justified
standard of correct performance. It is implicit in this approach that
some combination of evolution and personal learning history leads
to people being well adapted to the environment. However, be-
cause deductive reasoning patently fails to match well to formal
logic, a critical part of Oaksford and Chater’s work (1998) lies in
an attack on logic as the normative framework and its replacement
with alternatives. Building on their general criticisms of logicist
cognitive science (Oaksford & Chater, 1991), they went on to
assert that any theory of reasoning incorporating logic as a
computational-level explanation was flawed (Oaksford & Chater,
1993, 1995). As mentioned, they included mental model theory in
this category. As an indicator of their approach, consider the
following:
If, as we have argued, everyday reasoning is nonlogical, then mental
logics and mental models would seem to be unable to generalise
beyond the laboratory. But recent psychological results indicate that
logic-based models may be inappropriate even within the laboratory.
(Oaksford & Chater, 1995, p. 135)
A good example of Oaksford and Chater’s ecological approach
involves their treatment of the Wason selection task as reflecting
optimal data selection strategies. Oaksford and Chater (1994)
argued that the selection task should be analyzed, not as a problem
in logical reasoning, but as a decision task governed by the
expected information gain associated with each card. By assuming
the viewpoint of a disinterested observer, applying information
theory and introducing some broad assumptions about parameters
987
(specifically that the events p and q by default are rare for a claim
“if p then q”), Oaksford and Chater (1994) were able to argue that
the typical choices on the selection task were in fact rational and
adaptive. (See also, Nickerson, 1996, for an independent but
related analysis of the selection task.)
Since the early 1990s, other researchers have been exploring the
idea of reasoning as decision making, again focusing particularly
on the Wason selection task (Evans & Over, 1996a; Green & Over,
2000; Green, Over, & Pyne, 1997; Kirby, 1994; Manktelow &
Over, 1991; Over & Manktelow, 1993). These approaches differ
somewhat from those of Oaksford and Chater (1994), who while
giving a decision-theoretic account of the deontic selection task,
preferred a disinterested observer responding to default values as
their model of the abstract task. Their proposals proved somewhat
controversial in this regard (Evans & Over, 1996b; Laming, 1996;
Oaksford & Chater, 1996), illustrating the difficulty of agreeing on
an alternative once logic is abandoned as the standard. The rational
analysis program of Oaksford and Chater has, however, been
extended recently to cover deductive reasoning tasks proper, in-
cluding a probability heuristics model of syllogistic reasoning
(Chater & Oaksford, 1999) and a probability model of conditional
reasoning (Oaksford et al., 2000). There are some parallels here
with recent work claiming that people use simple but effective
heuristics in probabilistic reasoning (Gigerenzer, 1996; Gigerenzer
& Todd, 1999).
The rational analysis and decision-theoretic approaches have in
common a rejection of logic as the normative standard and an
assumption that people presented with reasoning tasks make de-
cisions that reflect effective, everyday means of achieving goals.
These approaches also propose mechanisms that are domain gen-
eral and make no explicit proposals about the origins of the
adaptive behaviors. In these last respects, the ecological approach
offered by evolutionary psychologists is sharply different. The first
major contribution of this kind to the reasoning field was made by
Cosmides (1989), who proposed that some facilitatory contexts
demonstrated in the literature involved a form of social exchange
or social contract, together with an instructional orientation to
search for cheaters. She presented an evolutionary argument for
the operation of an innate reasoning module, or Darwinian algo-
rithm, in such contexts. This might produce choices normally
regarded as logically correct but not by facilitating a process of
logical reasoning. Indeed, social-exchange theory incorporates its
own normative theory of an ecological nature.
Over recent years, this evolutionary account of reasoning has
developed significantly (see Fiddick, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2000),
although it has been mostly restricted in experimental investiga-
tions to the selection task. The contemporary version of the theory
(in response to Manktelow & Over, 1990) includes a second
domain-specific module for reasoning about hazard management
to account for some facilitatory contexts that are clearly not social
contracts. Theorists have predicted and demonstrated experimen-
tally that, provided that one of these scenarios is strongly cued, the
syntax of the rule presented is not critical, and that consequently,
choices can be dissociated from the logical structure of the task
(Fiddick et al., 2000; Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992). Fiddick et al. have
also proposed a principle of preemptive specificity in which a
domain-specific reasoning system—when available—always takes
precedence over a domain-general one.
 988 EVANS
Evolutionary approaches to cognition have proved quite contro-
versial. One issue that has been relatively little explored is whether
adaptive reasoning derives directly from evolution or is primarily
based on learning in the lifetime of the individual (as emphasized,
e.g., by Evans & Over, 1996a). The notion that the mind is
massively modular—that is, contains no general purpose reasoning
system— has been fiercely debated (see Fodor, 2001; Over, in
press; Pinker, 1997). However, the recent proposals of Fiddick et
al. (2000) do not preclude the operation of domain-general rea-
soning, and Cosmides and Tooby (2000) have proposed a mech-
anism to deal with the improvisation of solutions to evolutionarily
novel problems. Another line of attack, discussed in the Individual,
Evolutionary, and Ecological Rationality section, is that evolution-
ary psychologists have failed to distinguish evolutionary from
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individual rationality (Stanovich & West, 2000, in press).
A second, orthogonal issue of whether adaptive reasoning re-
flects domain-specific or domain-general processes has been de-
bated more thoroughly. For example, Cheng and Holyoak (1985)
had proposed that facilitatory contexts in the selection task in-
volved permission or obligation contexts for which people possess
pragmatic reasoning schemas. Like Darwinian algorithms, such
schemas could be triggered by context and applied to solve the
problem. However, pragmatic reasoning schemas range over
broader contexts, and these authors suggested no evolutionary
basis for them. This led to an argument that Cosmides’s (1989)
findings could be accounted for by schema theory (Cheng &
Holyoak, 1989; see also Gigerenzer, 1995; Holyoak & Cheng,
1995).
More recently, Sperber, Cara, and Girotto (1995) proposed a
domain-general account of the selection task based on relevance
theory, originally developed as a theory of pragmatics and com-
munication (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). The reasoning theory ex-
ploits, not the communicative principle of relevance, but the less
well-known cognitive principle of relevance. According to this
principle, relevance is related positively to cognitive effects and
negatively to cognitive effort. Sperber et al. appear to have ac-
cepted logic as the normative theory when they argued that “by
manipulating subjects’ expectation of relevance, correct perfor-
mance can be elicited in any conceptual domain” (p. 36), although
they also stated that this prediction did not commit them to the
view that the cognitive processes involved are domain general. In
the analysis of Sperber et al., a conditional statement, if p then q,
has logical properties that may be revealed in each of three cases
according to the pragmatic cues in the context provided. Only one
of these, requiring the most cognitive effort, would uncover the
basis for the correct choices on Wason’s selection task. This does
appear to be a domain-general, and indeed logical, theory of
conditional reasoning. Sperber et al. also proposed logicality in
implicit or unconscious inferential processes (see also Sperber &
Wilson, 1995).
The role of context in relevance theory is seen not as one of
providing specialist reasoning mechanisms (pragmatic reasoning
schemas, domain-specific modules) but rather as one of affecting
the interpretation and representation of the conditional statement.
The same is true in the mental model theory of conditional rea-
soning (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002; Johnson-Laird, Byrne, &
Schaeken, 1992). In this theory, conditionals are understood by
reference to the extension of logical possibilities (mental models)
that they allow. The possibilities that are actually represented may,
however, be affected by pragmatic factors in the context, a process
described as pragmatic modulation (Johnson-Laird & Byrne,
2002).
Dual Process Theories of Reasoning
The idea that reasoning tasks may involve two distinct forms of
thinking has been explored since the 1970s, although the proposals
at that time were fragmentary and have only recently been inte-
grated into more coherent theoretical schemes. For example, Wa-
son and Evans (1975) showed that the verbal reports that partici-
pants gave to account for their choices on the Wason selection task
showed no awareness of underlying causes such as matching bias
and instead appeared to reflect rationalizations in the context of the
logical instructions given. Wason and Evans suggested the exis-
tence of Type 1 processes, underlying choices, and Type 2 pro-
cesses, determining verbal report. Much more recently, I (Evans,
1996) showed that people spend far more time thinking about the
cards they choose than the ones they reject, suggesting that people
decide first and think afterward in order to justify choices that are
unconsciously determined. This again implies that card choices are
not determined by any conscious consequential reasoning.
I (Evans, 1982) proposed an observable distinction between
logical and nonlogical process in deductive reasoning tasks, sug-
gesting that behavior reflects a competition between two pro-
cesses, formally modeled by me (Evans, 1977; see also Krauth,
1982) and applied to the explanation of belief bias findings as a
belief–logic conflict by Evans et al. (1983). I further modified this
idea (Evans, 1984, 1989) in the heuristic–analytic theory. Accord-
ing to this proposal, preconscious heuristics determine what is and
is not represented as relevant in a reasoning task. These represen-
tations include both selective features of the task information and
relevant prior knowledge retrieved from long-term memory. An-
alytical reasoning processes capable of deduction by a then un-
specified process were then applied to these representations. A
range of cognitive biases were then explained on the basis that
heuristic processes often lead people to ignore logically relevant
information or to focus on logically irrelevant features of the
problem (Evans, 1989).
Evans and Over (1996a) proposed a dual process theory of
reasoning, much influenced by Reber’s (1993) theory in the field
of implicit learning, which integrated these apparently diverse
earlier proposals. They suggested that there were two distinct
cognitive systems underlying implicit and explicit cognition, sub-
sequently called System 1 and System 2, respectively, by Stanovich
(1999). A closely related proposal distinguishing associative from
rule-based reasoning was published around the same time by
Sloman (1996). The implicit system (System 1) was seen by Evans
and Over (1996a) as essentially pragmatic and associative in
nature. While rapid, high-capacity, and efficient, this system was
largely driven by past learning. (The possibility of innate cognitive
modules was not excluded.) The explicit system (System 2) was
seen as slow, sequential, and limited by working memory capacity.
This system was described not as logical, but as capable of finding
solutions to logical problems and engaging in other kinds of
hypothetical thinking such as hypothesis testing, solving novel
problems, forecasting, and consequential decision making. The
general features attributed to the two systems are summarized in
Table 2.
 LOGIC AND REASONING 989

Table 2 heuristic–analytic theory) in which cognitive representations are

Characteristics Attributed to the Two Systems of Thinking in
Dual Process Theories
System 1: Implicit
Unconscious
Automatic
Evolved early
Shared with other animals
Independent of language
Pragmatic/contextualized
High processing capacity, parallel
Driven by learning and innate
modules
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modified by prior knowledge before the application of explicit
reasoning strategies. The dual process distinction is therefore seen
as orthogonal to the models–rules debate and implicit in some of
System 2: Explicit the arguments of these authors.
Conscious
Controllable Deductive Reasoning and the Rationality Debate
Evolved late
Uniquely human At the very core of the deduction paradigm when it became
Related to language
established in the 1960s was the assumption that logicality was
Logical/abstract
Constrained by working memory, equated with rationality. For this reason, it was important to
sequential establish whether people could reason logically. The obvious way
Permits hypothetical thinking to do this was to give them problems of a logical nature and see if
their inferences accorded with this normative system. Recall from

Independent of general Correlated with general intelligence

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intelligence
This dual process theory encompasses and integrates all earlier
proposals about dual factors in reasoning tasks. Heuristic and
nonlogical processes reside in System 1 that direct attention and
often prompt direct responding via pragmatic processes. System 2
can provide verbal rationalizations of the kind observed by Wason
and Evans (1975), but this is not its normal function; rather, it
reflects some peculiar qualities of the selection task. System 2
reasoning can override pragmatic influences and lead to norma-
tively correct solutions. In this respect, evidence for the theory has
been much advanced by the individual differences research pro-
gram of Stanovich (1999). Stanovich has accumulated substantial
evidence for Reber’s (1993) proposal that the explicit cognitive
system is linked to measure of general intelligence, whereas the
implicit system is independent of measured intelligence. For ex-
ample, performance on the abstract Wason selection task is related
to general intelligence, whereas performance on deontic and the-
matic versions is not (Stanovich & West, 1998). In the theory, only
the abstract version requires System 2 reasoning for its solution.
Similarly, Stanovich and West (1997) have shown that the ability
to resist belief biases in reasoning is related to general intelligence
as well as to certain cognitive style measures. Performance on
belief–logic conflict problems also declines sharply with age (Gi-
linsky & Judd, 1994), which is consistent with the idea that
System 2 thinking, with its dependence on working memory, is
much more vulnerable to aging than is the pragmatic and associa-
tive System 1.
Dual process theories connect to earlier theoretical issues dis-
cussed here in interesting ways. For example, as I noted earlier,
both mental logicians (Braine & O’Brien, 1998) and relevance
theorists (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) envisage a level of automatic
inference that is distinguishable from error-prone explicit reason-
ing processes. Thus modus ponens is seen as hardwired into the
lexicon for if, whereas modus tollens requires difficult supposi-
tional reasoning (Braine & O’Brien, 1991). A similar distinction
can be found in the mental model theory of Johnson-Laird (1983)
who proposed the use of single (but defeasible) models underlying
automatic inferencing in discourse comprehension from the search
for alternative models that characterized explicit deductive reason-
ing. In the most recent proposals of Johnson-Laird and Byrne
(2002), the mechanism of pragmatic modulation could be seen as
a System 1 influence (not unlike the heuristic element of the
the discussion of the early Wason studies that when participants
failed to produce the correct answers their very rationality was in
question. They were considered illogical and therefore irrational.
It is possible that the rhetoric of irrationality in the deduction
field might have received less attention had it not coincided with
the more widely known heuristics and biases paradigms of Tver-
sky and Kahneman (see Kahneman et al., 1982), being pursued at
the same period. By the late 1970s claims for human irrationality,
especially derived from the latter field or work, were rife. A
rationalist backlash was inevitable, and strongly argued when it
arrived. For example, Gigerenzer and Murray (1987; chap. 5) in
their discussion of Kahneman and Tversky’s research program,
questioned their definition of rationality in terms of context-
independent normative systems, presaging a sustained attack on
the heuristics and biases program and attempting to redefine ra-
tionality in ecological terms (see Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995;
Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992; Vranas, 2000).
The first major critique of bias research in modern times was,
however, presented by the philosopher Jonathan Cohen (1981),
who surveyed psychological work on both deductive and proba-
bilistic inference and declared that human irrationality could not be
proven by such research. His critique incorporated three major
aspects which I (Evans, 1993) termed the normative system prob-
lem, the interpretation problem, and the external validity problem.
The first argument was that the normative system used by the
experimenter (e.g., propositional logic, the probability calculus,
formal decision theory) might not be that used by the participant
and might not be the best in any case for judging real world
rationality. Many of Gigerenzer’s arguments with the heuristics
and biases program fall into this category. The interpretation
problem (see also Henle, 1962; Smedslund, 1970, 1990) is that
people may not understand the problem as the experimenter in-
tends and could be reasoning logically from some alternative
interpretation. The external validity problem is that the psycholog-
ical experiments used are unrepresentative and artificial. Later
versions of this argument suggested that while inducing error in
the laboratory is beneficial for the investigation of cognitive pro-
cesses, it should not then be regarded as representative of error
rates in the real world (Funder, 1987; Lopes, 1991).
The normative systems argument, of course, is highly relevant
to the evaluation of the deduction paradigm. If formal logic is not
a good yardstick for measuring rational reasoning, then one of the
main pillars of the paradigm is knocked away. Close examination
of this argument has led contemporary theorists to distinguish
normative from alternative definitions of rationality. For example,
 990 EVANS
Evans and Over (1996a), following from an earlier work of mine
(Evans, 1993), focused on what they termed the paradox of ratio-
nality: the observation on the one hand that the human species has
been very successful and intelligent and on the other hand, the
evidence of frequent bias and error in the reasoning laboratory.
They suggested that the term rationality has two distinct meanings,
personal rationality (Rationality 1): reasoning, making decisions,
or acting in a way that is generally reliable for achieving one’s
goals and normative rationality (Rationality 2): reasoning, making
decisions, or acting when one has reason for what one does
sanctioned by a normative theory.
Evans and Over (1996a) were not, of course, alone in arguing
for an alternative theory of rationality based on adaptiveness. This
is intrinsic to the ecological and evolutionary approaches to rea-
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soning discussed earlier. However, the above definition of Ratio-
nality 1 is individual rather than evolutionary in nature, as distin-
guished later by Stanovich and West (2000).
Evans and Over (1996a) went on to argue that people’s behavior
is frequently Rational 1 even when Irrational 2. For example, the
phenomenon of belief bias can be explained on the grounds that it
is rational in everyday life to reason from all relevant belief. This
would lead one, for example, to reject valid arguments on the basis
of unbelievable premises, to introduce additional assumptions
from background knowledge to support otherwise fallacious con-
clusions, and to examine more critically arguments whose conclu-
sions one disputes. While according with personal rationality, such
mechanisms carried over into the psychological laboratory violate
the theory of normative rationality because participants fail to
comply with the deductive reasoning instructions given. This dual
rationality links—though not one to one—with the dual process
theory of thinking already described. Evans and Over (1996a)
argued that personal rationality can often be achieved by the
learning incorporated into System 1 process without the require-
ment for System 2 intervention, whereas System 2 thinking is
required to achieve normative rationality. As already described,
the subsequent work of Stanovich (1999) provided strong evidence
that normative solutions do indeed involve System 2 thinking.
Stanovich (1999, see also Stanovich & West, 2000) drew a
different distinction between individual and evolutionary rational-
ity that bears directly on the arguments of evolutionary psychol-
ogists working the reasoning field. I consider these arguments
shortly. However, it is first necessary to consider the interpretation
problem in the context of deductive reasoning research as it bears
centrally on the value of the paradigm.
Logic and Language: The Interpretation Problem
One of the rationalist objections to claims of illogicality noted
above is the interpretation problem. This is not always easy to
distinguish from the normative systems problem because the nor-
mative system that applies may depend on how the task is con-
strued. For example, Oaksford and Chater (1994) claimed that
people construe the Wason selection task as an information/deci-
sion problem so that logic is not the appropriate normative system.
However, there is arguably quite a serious interpretation problem
with the deduction paradigm in this regard that deserves some
discussion. When the paradigm is used to assess deductive com-
petence, much of the actual task is left implicit. Certainly, the rules
of logic are not explicitly defined because part of the purpose of
the original research was to establish whether people had such
rules already present in their minds. More critically, logical anal-
ysis rests on the assumption that linguistic terms such as if, or, and
some translate unambiguously as logical operators. Without this
(easily refuted) assumption, the normative analysis of answers as
logically right and wrong is undermined.
Consider the case of if. In elementary propositional logic, an
operator known as material implication and represented by the
symbol 傻 or 3 is of importance. Material implication between
two propositions, p 傻 q is a relation that is true except in the case
of p and not q. As noted earlier, this relation defines the valid
inference of modus ponens and modus tollens but defines as
fallacies the inferences of affirmation of the consequent and denial
of the antecedent. Traditionally, logicians used the English word if
to represent this relationship of material implication in their text-
books, leading many psychologists to adopt this as a standard for
normative assessment. Unfortunately, the assumption that the or-
dinary conditional of natural language is material leads to serious
paradoxes, which have led most contemporary philosophical logi-
cians explicitly to reject material implication as the meaning of if
(see Edgington, 1995).
Logicians also traditionally use the made-up word iff to repre-
sent material equivalence or biconditionality (if and only if p then
q) in which p implies q and vice versa. This rule is false when there
is p and not q, and also when there is q and not p. Of course, there
is no such word as iff, and in natural language the word if is
ambiguously represented as a conditional or biconditional accord-
ing to context (see Evans, Newstead, & Byrne, 1993, chap. 2).
These considerations create considerable difficulties for the deduc-
tion paradigm if it is to be used to assess the logical accuracy of
conditional reasoning. For example, when asked to evaluate the
case “B and 7” with respect to the conditional statement “If there
is a C, then there is a 4,” most people say that it is irrelevant. If the
conditional statement is interpreted as material implication, they
should say the case makes the rule true. Is this to be deemed an
error, when many philosophical logicians argue that the ordinary
conditional asserts nothing about cases in which the antecedent
does not hold?
What of the affirmation of the consequent? Consider this
argument:
If there is an A, there is a 3.
There is a 3.
Therefore, there is an A.
Most participants say that this conclusion follows (see Evans,
Newstead, & Byrne, 1993). Traditionally, psychologists mark this
as an error because it is a classical fallacy. However, because if can
be used to represent biconditionality in natural contexts, is it not
formally ambiguous when used with abstract problems of this
kind? Research on disjunctive reasoning runs into similar difficul-
ties, because or can be used both exclusively and inclusively in
natural discourse, with context again providing the resolution.
Research on syllogistic reasoning similarly encounters difficulties
with statements of the form “Some A are B” and “Some A are not
B” that are logically distinct but for reasons of Gricean implicature
(in which some would normally exclude all) tend to be regarded by
participants as implying each other (Newstead & Griggs, 1983).
 LOGIC AND REASONING
The interpretation problem is a very serious one indeed for
traditional users of the deduction paradigm who wish to assess
logical accuracy. To pass muster, participants are required not only
to disregard the problem content but also any prior beliefs they
may have relevant to it. They must also translate the problem into
a logical representation using the interpretations of key terms that
accord with a textbook (not supplied) of standard logic (but not
contemporary philosophical logic), whilst disregarding the mean-
ing of the same terms in everyday natural discourse.
Of course, reasoning researchers may retort that they are inter-
ested in the ordinary meaning of the terms and that the point of
their research is to discover the interpretation that people place on
them— conditional or biconditional readings of if, exclusive or
inclusive interpretations of or, for example. It has been argued,
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however, that one could only safely infer these interpretations by
assuming that people were reasoning logically from their personal
representation (Smedslund, 1970), as one is otherwise locked in a
circle of infinite regress. Although this argument is suspect (see
Evans, 1993), there is some basis for it. In particular, why else
would the reasoning researcher expect that instructing people to
reason logically would help to uncover such interpretations?
Individual, Evolutionary, and Ecological Rationality
Those reasoning researchers espousing ecological views of ra-
tionality clearly reject logic as the correct normative system. For
example, attacks on logicism have been central to Oaksford and
Chater’s (1998) rational analysis program (Oaksford & Chater,
1991). Gigerenzer (see Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992; Hertwig, Ort-
mann, & Gigerenzer, 1997) denied content-free logical reasoning
as a model of rationality, preferring effective domain-dependent
reasoning instead, as have psychologists supporting a strongly
evolutionary position (Fiddick et al., 2000). As Hertwig et al.
(1997) put it:
Those who study first-order logic or variants thereof, such as mental
rules and mental models, ignore the ecological and social structure of
environments. The literature on cognitive “biases” is full of examples
in which evidence of ecological and social rationality is mistaken as
systematic error in logical reasoning. (p. 106)
The term ecological rationality refers to behavior that is adap-
tive to the current environments in which people find themselves.
Evolutionary rationality refers to genetically programmed adapta-
tions that evolved over many thousands of years. The terms cannot
simply be equated because (a) behavior can be ecologically ratio-
nal because of general learning in the lifetime of individuals and
(b) the contemporary environment differs in significant ways from
that in which humans achieved most of their evolution. The dis-
tinction (or lack of it) has been the matter of some significant
debate. In response to a critical review by Over (2000a) of the
work of Gigerenzer and Todd (1999) on fast and frugal heuristics,
Todd, Fiddick, and Krauss (2000) sought some separation when
they commented, “Evolutionary psychology is grounded in eco-
logical rationality (rather than the other way around, as Over,
2000, suggests)”, although they also went on to state, “[the] simple
heuristics we have explored are also good candidates for evolved
mechanisms” (p. 379; for a response, see Over, 2000b). The
question is relevant when one considers the criticism that evolu-
tionary psychologists have failed to recognize the distinction be-
991
tween evolutionary and individual rationality (Stanovich & West,
2000, in press). Stanovich and West (2000, in press) also referred
to individual rationality as normative rationality on the basis of the
decision-theoretic norm of serving the goals that an individual
pursues.
The distinction between evolutionary and individual rationality
is critical with regard to the value of the deduction paradigm.
Stanovich and West (in press) argued that
evolutionary psychologists . . . have missed (or failed to sufficiently
emphasise) that definitions of rationality must coincide with the level
of the entity whose optimisation is at issue. . . . The distinction follows
from the fact that genes—as subpersonal replicators— can increase
their fecundity and longevity in ways that do not necessarily serve the
instrumental goals of the vehicles built by the genome.
They went on to argue, with reference to their version of the dual
process theory of reasoning, that System 1 processes serve evolu-
tionary rationality but that the later evolution (see also Reber,
1993) of System 2 reasoning processes allows pursuit of individual
rationality. This is because System 2 is a “long-leash” system
(Stanovich & West, in press) provided by but not directly con-
trolled by the genes. While a general problem-solving and reason-
ing system is adaptive, it can be used for many purposes other than
that for which it was designed. For example, individuals develop
and implement strategies for achieving long lifetimes, even though
these can be of no benefit to the genes once offspring have been
produced and safely raised. As noted earlier, however, some evo-
lutionary psychologists have begun to address these issues. For
example, Cosmides and Tooby (2000) have discussed a distinction
between dedicated and improvisational intelligences.
The relevant part of Stanovich and West’s (2000, in press)
argument for the purpose of this article is that evolutionary and
normative rationality may have become detached in many areas,
leading to cognitive biases that only individuals with high general
intelligence may be able to overcome. This is because the envi-
ronment in which people operate today is substantially different
from that in which they evolved. For example, Stanovich (1999)
argued that the fundamental computational bias to contextualize all
information is a product of System 1 reasoning and evolutionary
rationality but leaves people ill-equipped to deal with many as-
pects of a modern technological society that require abstract rea-
soning. Hence, Stanovich’s position can be seen as a defense of the
deduction paradigm as well as other reasoning and problem-
solving tasks that have content-free, normatively defined solutions.
This is because ability to solve such tasks is a sensitive measure of
both cognitive capacity (general intelligence) and thinking dispo-
sitions that enable people to make effective use of System 2
processes that have high individual rationality in the modern
environment.
Conclusion
The deductive reasoning paradigm has yielded hundreds of
published experiments over the past 40 years, and few would deny
that it has made a substantial contribution to psychology’s under-
standing of human cognition. In this review, it has been shown that
use of the paradigm has led to discovery of many important
experimental findings and has motivated the construction and test
of a wide range of rich cognitive psychological theories. What is
 992
at issue is whether the accepted methodology is the most efficient
and appropriate available for investigating the questions that rea-
soning researchers now predominantly ask.
First, there has been a progressive movement away from logi-
cism. This makes one less interested in the question of whether
people have deductive competence and changes one’s view of
biases that are observed relative to the logical standard, as these are
no longer to be taken as clear indicators of error and irrationality.
However, it does not diminish the importance of bias research that
has revealed many important psychological insights into the rea-
soning process. Second, it is difficult to assess logicality on such
tasks, as the much vexed question of how to translate everyday
terms into logical relations is typically left implicit in problem
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instructions. The most significant consideration, however, is the
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nature of the research findings themselves. Evidence has accumu-
lated that reasoning is highly constrained by content and con-
text and that pragmatic factors relating to prior knowledge
and belief are independent of the underlying logical structure of
the problems.
All of this leads to a fairly specific methodological issue con-
cerning the kinds of instructions that participants are given in
reasoning tasks. If participants are instructed (as they traditionally
are) to reason only on the basis of information given and to draw
only conclusions that are logically necessary, then they are often
being set up to fail, because they are asked to discard everyday
reasoning processes that are both pragmatic and probabilistic or to
disregard the ordinary meaning of the terms used to describe
logical relationships. If what investigators are really interested in is
pragmatic and probabilistic processes, then why do they not gen-
erally follow the lead of some recent researchers (such as George,
1995; Stevenson & Over, 1995) by asking people simply to say
what follows (rather than what necessarily follows) and allowing
them to express uncertainty or probability directly when making
their inferences? On the Wason selection task, for example, the
classic instruction is to choose those cards and only those cards
that are necessary to turn over to discover whether the rule is true
or false. Why is the instruction not simply to ask people to choose
cards that would help them decide whether the rule is true or false?
The standard instructions on the deduction paradigm actually
conflate two things. Participants are told to assume the premises
and also to draw necessary conclusions. Authors such as Henle
(1962) assumed that people are rational (logical) in the latter
regard but not in the former. That is, people may give the premises
a personal interpretation or add knowledge from background be-
liefs but still reason logically from what they have assumed (see
Logic and Language: The Interpretation Problem). In fact, people
could be instructed to draw necessary conclusions from beliefs or
to draw probabilistic conclusions from premises, although very
few studies have done this. The nature of the instructions given has
actually received remarkably little attention in the reasoning liter-
ature. However, we do know that the instructional requirement to
assume the premises and to draw necessary conclusions has an
effect. When such instructions are relaxed, responses are more
belief based and less logical (George, 1995; Stevenson & Over,
1995), and when such instructions are more strongly emphasized,
logical fallacies may be reduced and effects of prior belief may be
inhibited to some extent (Evans, Allen, Newstead, & Pollard,
1994; Newstead et al., 1992).
EVANS
Some theorists have argued that there is logicality in the implicit
inferencing that people do in understanding discourse (e.g., Braine
& O’Brien, 1991; Sperber & Wilson, 1995). Some form of logic in
the belief system makes sense because deduction allows people to
generalize their knowledge and apply it to new examples. For
example, if John introduces Mary as his sister and June as his
mother, no conscious process of reasoning is required to see that
June is Mary’s mother. It would clearly be grossly inefficient to
learn family relationships anew for each family encountered, there-
fore belief systems in some way operate as though they are
generalizing knowledge in rules and making deductions from
them. Interesting though this issue of implicit logicality in belief
and discourse comprehension is, it is important to understand that
it has little to do with issues addressed in this review. The deduc-
tion paradigm is all about giving people problems in which pre-
mises must be linked and deductions drawn in an explicit manner
according to the instructions given. The issue at stake is whether
people apply logic in this explicit reasoning process.
It can be strongly argued that people untrained in formal logic
do, in fact, exhibit a rudimentary deductive competence when
confronted with these tasks (Evans & Over, 1996a, 1997; Over &
Evans, 1997), notwithstanding their proneness to pragmatic influ-
ences and a range of other biases discussed in this article. This
competence needs to be accounted for by theorists, which is what
the rules versus mental models debate was originally concerned
with. The existence of this competence is consequently a problem
for theories of reasoning that emphasize only ecological validity in
content-dependent processes, whether they be based on informa-
tion, decision-theoretic, or evolutionary principles. The reason that
the dual process framework has been gaining popularity is that
human reasoning appears to be predominantly but not exclusively
pragmatic in nature.
Research findings on the deduction paradigm accord with dual
process theory if one assumes that System 2 (explicit) thinking is
required to find normative solutions. Not only are some individuals
who are high in general intelligence more likely to reason logically
(Stanovich, 1999), but all individuals are more likely to do so
when exhorted by instructions. Possibly the best defense for con-
tinued use of the deduction paradigm in its current form lies in the
research program of Stanovich (1999) and the evidence that ability
to solve such tasks is related to measures of high intelligence. This
finding must at least give pause for thought before discarding the
notion of logic-based normative rationality completely as some
ecological and evolutionary theorists would have people do. How-
ever, Stanovich’s findings perhaps fall short of demonstrating that
there is anything special about logic. The people who solve these
problems are also the ones who tend to find normative solutions to
probabilistic inference and decision problems. What makes them
stand out, according to Stanovich’s own analysis, is the ability to
reason abstractly, to attend to the instructions, and to suppress the
influence of prior belief.
Having said this, explicit deductive reasoning clearly is of value
in many real world situations. It arises when people need to
understand rules and regulations (e.g., tax laws) and apply them to
individual cases. A car mechanic uses deductive and eliminative
reasoning to identify faults on a broken-down vehicle (e.g., to
distinguish fuel starvation from ignition failure). A computer pro-
grammer must understand logical relationships to design algo-
rithms and to debug misbehaving programs. Whether such reason-
 LOGIC AND REASONING
ing requires a logic in the mind is clearly moot, however. In all the
examples mentioned, people tend to train and rely on experts to do
the reasoning for them. That effective procedures for such reason-
ing can be learned (none of these problems were around in the
environment in which humans evolved) testifies at least to some
kind of facility for flexible—long-leash— cognition. It still leaves
open the question of whether solving deductive tasks involves
anything more than application of strategic problem solving in
which logic forms part of the problem definition (Evans, 2000).
As to the future, it would seem sensible, not to abandon the
deduction paradigm, but much more readily to supplement it with
a variety of other methods of studying human reasoning. It is the
right tool for some of the purposes to which it is put, but inappro-
priate to many others. If the purpose is to study and explain
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
deductive competence or to examine the conflict arising when
people are asked to ignore prior belief and assume premises, then
the paradigm has clear value. However, when what one is really
interested in is pragmatic and probabilistic reasoning, it is pointless
to do this with straitjacketed instructions that ask people to assume
premises and draw necessary conclusions. Future researchers need
to ensure that the methods they use in studying human reasoning
are appropriate to the questions they ask.
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Received June 1, 2001
Revision received May 23, 2002
Accepted May 23, 2002 䡲